Becky says things about … hangovers

I would first like to say, dear suspicious listener, that just because I am writing about hangovers doesn’t mean I have recently suffered from one.*

*It completely does. I have recently been killed by a hangover, and miraculously came back to life, a bit like Jesus.

Hangovers are God’s way of telling you you’re an idiot. Hangovers are a punishment for having fun. Hangovers are your body deciding that it’s going to take away a day of your life by preventing you from doing anything remotely productive and instead forcing you to spend the day in bed eating bowl after bowl of cereal and watching episode after episode of The Golden Girls on YouTube.

Most certainly, Stickman, but it is far more enjoyable when one chooses to spend a day in such pleasant diversion, not when it is literally the only thing that one can do apart from lie on the floor in a pit of self-disgust and softly wail. And if you’ve eaten all my cereal I am going to be livid.

Like life itself or the quality of supermarket own-brand products, hangovers are unpredictable. You can never tell whether they are going to be a mere mild irritation, like a slightly sunburnt elbow, or a fatally catastrophic life-altering event that forces you to reassess your very existence.

Sometimes, the sheer meekness and mildness of a hangover can be a stupendous victory that makes you feel like a superhero with a liver and stomach made of titanium (I think they call that particular superhero ‘Low-Density Corrosion-Resistant Transition Metal Major Organs Man’). Those nights when you start on the beer, then have a few cheeky wines, then some bright spark suggests Jagarmeister, then before you know it you’ve got your face in a bucket of Sambuca and someone is preparing a syringe with which they mean to inject absinthe into your eyeballs, and you wake up the next morning to nothing but a slight headache and an ambiguous stain on your lapel.

These hangovers are worth celebrating. You are clearly bionic and incredible, and that deserves a pat on the back and a massive full English breakfast, a stroll in the park feeling fresh and breezy, and quite possibly a few cheeky beverages later on in the day to thank your body for being so utterly super and brilliant.

And when those nights of absinthe-injecting and tequila-inserting and Sambuca-snorting do catch up with you, and you wake up to cataclysmic devastation and horrible awfulness and a cat is on fire and people have died, you don’t mind so much, because you know you ruddy well deserve it.

After a hard day at work you think to yourself ‘I’m going to imbibe a couple of well-earned alcohol beverages because I have been productive, efficient and generally smashing today, and what harm can a mere two glasses of wine do to my most excellent body?’ And you pop down the pub. You consume said two drinks, perhaps three, if you have one forced upon you or there’s a sudden and unpredicted thunderstorm outside and to leave the premises would be dangerous. Then you go home and you go to bed. It is a perfectly pleasant evening.

And then you wake up and you feel like this:

Your second emotion is confusion. Your first emotion is an intense wish to die, but you quickly pass over that on the grounds of it being dramatic. You are confused. Why has this happened? Why do you hurt so? Who hates you? Did you really only have two drinks, or did you have thirty, get chucked out of the pub, mug an old lady, steal her pension, use it to buy Special Brew and White Lightening, find a bush in a park, drink £80’s worth of almost illegally-strong alcohol in said bush, gatecrash a student party and achieve a record for sucking the contents of a bottle of vodka up your bottom through a straw, steal ninety-five cans of cheap lager, drink them all whilst standing on your head and get a cheer for vomiting into a pint glass and then mixing it with Lambrini and drinking it, then fly to Dublin, wipe out an entire village of its Guinness, fly back, and get hit by a transit bus carrying holidaymakers to their plane to Malaga?

These hangovers are confusing. They’re unfair. They are disproportionate to the amount of alcohol you consumed. The ratio of fun to pain is deeply unbalanced. They are nefarious. They are like a malicious Pain Lord wreaking havoc in your innocent body with his pointed stick and his penchant for inflicting misery. They are not to be trusted. They make you doubt yourself. They make you think you are destined to a life of tea, coffee and fizzy pop, ultimately leading to stained teeth and offensive wind. You begin to yearn for liver disease.

Hangovers make you slow. If your hungover motor ability was a tortoise, it would be jeered at by the other speedier tortoises.

Hangovers confuse your stomach. One minute you are gorging on fried sausages and two loaves of bread, and the next you experience that phenomenon of Sudden and Categorical Certainty that You Will Vomit if You So Much as Move a Millimetre of Your Body.

So, dear listener, let that be a warning to you. Next time you fancy a quick drink down the pub, think again. That quick drink may be your undoing. That quick drink may change your life. That quick drink may force you to watch forty-seven videos of squirrels falling off walls and babies laughing at paper on YouTube.

Such philosophy there is to the hangover and you’ve captured it brilliantly 🙂 I remember “day after”s when I’ve had that cocky sense of being indestructible and others when I’ve suffered more than I thought I should. (you put it so well–out of proportion to the crime). But has any of this stopped me (or you) (or Stickman) from nights of revelry? There’s always the chance you’ll dodge the bullet so…. And the power of good food (though not necessarily good-for-you food) to calm hangovers can not be understated.

Food is King. No drunken or hungover person should be without it. Bananas, toast, cereal, burgers, pizza, curry, anything. The days you suffer more than you thought you should are the worst, and really bring a new depth of meaning to the phrase ‘life is unfair’.

The worst hangover, without a doubt, is the one caused by drinking Strawberry Cisco. I don’t know is worse – the sense the next morning that your eardrums are about to burst while you are swimming through lava or the blazing vomit after-taste which you aren’t quite sure is caused by the Cisco or actual vomit.

Urgh that actually made me throw up a bit in my mouth. I’ve never heard of Strawberry Cisco, but I’ve added it to my list of ‘Alcoholic Beverages to Stay Completely Away From’, so thanks for the heads up!

The unpredictability of hangovers has caused me to be very superstitious about what I drink and in what order. God knows that it has nothing to do with quantity… no, never that. The bionic hangovers don’t happen for me anymore though. We’re always hovering somewhere between “wishing for death” and “contemplating how to make death happen”.

‘Contemplating how to make death happen’ is pretty close to where I was the other day. And as for superstitions about what to drink in what order – I still live by ‘wine before beer, you’ll feel queer – beer before wine, you’ll feel fine’ – although there is of course the very likely chance that you will mix the rhyme up and end up with ‘wine after beer, you’ll feel queer, beer after wine, you’ll feel fine’ – and that’s when calamity ensues.

BGM, I decided to count this time, and this post made me laugh out loud 23 times. I’m not kidding. That doesn’t include the number of smiles, guffaws, or suppressed 1:30am chuckles that didn’t make it into the audible range. You are a genius.

You know how I know you’re a genius? Because even in your worst hangovers, you have so many thoughts… from mugging an old lady to crashing a student party to wiping out a village of Guinness. You on a hungover day sounds like an awesome person. Me on a hungover day, I can barely think.

Oh, and bonus points for the sheer amount of blood in today’s drawings.

Dave, that is profoundly generous of you. 23 out-loud laughs?! I have achieved my life’s goal. I’m glad my pain and suffering caused you to audibly express glee. Thanks, I think….
Sadly, I am not an awesome hungover person – I started trying to write it on the day of the hangover, and when an hour had passed and all I’d written was ‘Becky says things about…. ‘ I decided to call it a day, and wrote the post a couple of days after instead… Sorry to shatter illusions…..
And I thoroughly enjoyed the amount of blood, as well. It never ceases to amaze me how much blood can come out of a man made of stick.

don’t negate the fact that when you have kids you will want to drink more (I did not drink at all until I was a mom–not joking, kids drive you to drink). Though the hangovers are tough as you can’t stay in bed eating cheese balls and watching tv. You have to get up and drive the kids places and that won’t feel so good. No answers here unfortunately. Maybe you will make it work.

Never experienced a hangover?! You are amazing. I wish I was you. I can’t even imagine how glowing your skin must be 🙂
And I really enjoyed the amount of blood in this post. Stickmen bleeding profusely never cease to make me chuckle!

Excellent post! 😀 I often get hangovers when I’m out. I had the worst night t’other week, I went out with work and got absolutely oblitorated, I was meant to be going back to a girl from works house to crash as I’d parked my car at someone elses house near the town centre but I had that much I ended up disappearing from the pub and ended up in my car at 6am, window down, piss wet through with an unlit cigarette in my mouth. Apparently I’d thrown up all over said friends drive way I felt like someone had hit me with a sledgehammer, drove home and collasped in bed until half 3 in the afternoon! Missed a chance to sleep at a girls house, that was the most saddening thing that has ever happened to me.

My theory is that the strength of a hangover is directly proportional to the amount of fun you had, irrespective of volume consumed. It’s life keeping you balanced. Or in my case, one sniff of tequila, the devil’s juice.